


and the world collapses

by kafka (lostillusion)



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Depression, Domestic, F/F, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pianist and Assassin AU, Rantaro's That Guy™, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-02-13 08:21:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12980001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostillusion/pseuds/kafka
Summary: "She notes her surroundings being covered by plushies, pillow throws, and other soft to the touch materials. From across from her, Maki sees the door, silently ajar from the blonde’s rushed exit. Even without the light from the adjacent room, Maki could see white walls with decoration (though there was some hanging tape. Perhaps the woman had attempted to personalize her room before thinking otherwise?) and the ceiling with only a small, weak glow in the chorus of faded stars.How plain, Maki couldn’t help but think.Out of all of the people who could capture me, I got stuck with the plain one.She waits for the other woman to come back, her ears straining to catch the clatter the stranger makes from the other room. But she ends up slowly closing her eyes, strangely comforted by the sound of someone else in her general vicinity.Ah, Maki catches herself,that sounds sad."Kaede is a rising piano star struggling between obligation and passion. Maki is an assassin who was just kicked to the curb, now truly alone in the world. They're not so sure what they have towards each other, but they both know they don't want to let go just yet.





	1. The Curtain Rises, Side 1: Kaede

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Kaede,” Rantaro promptly drops all of his gifts on the floor and Kaede cannot help but watch them fall, click-clacking onto their floor. “Kaede, that’s not a cat.”
> 
> She looks away from the toys and looks back up to Rantaro, who is then pointing to their surprise guest, snoring away in Kaede’s bed. Said guest seemed to be almost swallowed up by the various pillows and large, softly colored plushies Kaede surrounds herself with on a nightly basis. The scene in front of her is such a wild contrast from before, with the plushies representing trash, the blankets representing the woman’s cloak and the puddles around her, and the pillows representing the heaps of dirt Kaede found her in. It makes her want to laugh a little, but she refrains. Rantaro doesn’t like jokes he isn’t in on.
> 
> Speaking of Rantaro, he probably wants some answers. Her gaze moves dully to and from the subject in the bed and back to her roommate. Kaede can only answer plainly:
> 
> “I know? I don’t know what you expected when I told you I picked someone up.” There is a snort, from the room, and Kaede watches as Rantaro flinches away from the sound. “I meant what I said. I brought someone home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow this is a lot. um, hi! it's been like. 100 years since I posted anything, much less in the dangan ronpa fandom? so, uh, hi. this was pretty self indulgent, and the tone gets a bit messy around a certain part? My writing is based on moods, and so they flicker while I'm writing for an extended period of time, which is what happened here.
> 
> Uh, anyway! Hello! I have like the next? Six chapters planned but not written so hopefully I finish this to the end, but it might be a journey, so bare with me until then! There's not a lot of changes to the characters, given that they're in a Non-Despair™ AU, but just a heads up!:
> 
> \- All of them are in their early 20s, since I may or may not write an soft nsfw scene? Which may or may not happen. But still! Fair warning.  
> \- Kaede is a mix of both pregame and during-game personalities. Like she's more so pregame right now without the, uh, apathetic tendencies. She's empty in this? If that makes sense. But she still does care about the people around her! It just doesn't show in the "I care about you because I love all of you as the protagonist!" sort of way  
> \- Rantaro is living with Kaede just because. I needed a third person. Possibly a POV character later? Depends on where this story is headed by for you Rantaro fans right now, uh, he sure is.  
> \- Maki is still an assassin and she still takes care of orphans, but not in the same context as in the game? You'll see

Life is like floating down a river that never seems to end. You go down the river, rocks and sediment scratching your back as you slide down the slope of the hill (as the water itself is no higher than your ankles), with nothing else but nature all around. Sometimes it could be gentle, and you can watch the sky above as the river carries you to whatever nature has planned. In this scenario, you’re given this rose-colored lens that makes you see everything and anything alive, and appreciate it for how all of these things, these _alive_ things, lives and breathes solely for the purpose of living. And the very idea of living just because you want to live is beautiful. You think it’s beautiful, anyway.

Sometimes, though, there’s times it’s like fighting against rapids as you tug against the stream and choke on both spit and freshwater, fighting to be taken off of this so-called “ride”. You try to claw your way out, try to find yourself on solid ground that’s _right_ next to you but you can’t; you’re lost in the waves of life and time and can only cry into the water where no one can hear you. It’s cruel and merciless, and at times it makes you wonder why you’re even trying in the first place.

Most of the time, however, you’re not really doing anything but closing your eyes and listening—but not _feeling—_ the world around you. It’s a waiting game, in this scenario. Waiting for what, most are unsure. But for you, you’re waiting until the water bends and you find yourself falling off a waterfall. A soundless death, the only evidence of your life being a single _splash_ that only the trees will hear. But then again, you could just fall into another river and down towards another waterfall. At least that’s what Kaede Akamatsu feels about her own life, feeling like a ragdoll down a stream.

Now, mind you, Kaede is a young woman barely out of her teens, as she walks cold streets alone, the sound of rain bubbling into her ears. Her destination? To the apartment she shares with an old high school friend, a certain Rantaro Amami. Recently, she’s become a little famous in the past few months, as more and more people are clammering to hear the child prodigy finally coming back to her craft. (In reality, however, her reemergence back to music was simply an act of giving up her resistance against her parents, bending to their "one" request. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth whenever she thinks about it.) She finds herself buried in requests to play for a variety of shows, which more often than not ranges between classical performances or opera (sometimes even contemporary, people urging her to bring her own compositions to play. But she burns _those_ immediately. She doesn’t want to remember the joys she has in music, lest her parents ruin that too), but Kaede doesn’t really have a preference either way. She chooses jobs randomly, even having her roommate pick them for her. Though she is blessed with requests from all over, they only give her a sandy taste in her mouth after each show.

Most of her time now consists of performing every few days or so, and then lounging in her apartment every day in between. People often ask her whether or not her life is as glamorous as it may seem, going to different places in Japan (and the world, at times, when she can bother to get out of bed for more than a day) and experiencing life to what people call “the fullest”. But Kaede holds back on her comments and arguments that it really isn’t, and that she feels more alive ironically watching _The Emoji Movie_ on Pornhub with her aforementioned roommate, than any performance she has ever played in recent years.

Which brings us back to her current situation, as Kaede stares down at a figure lying in the middle of an alleyway: the shortcut she usually takes to get home. She will admit, she’s a little buzzed right at that moment, and really isn’t in a good place to make permanent decisions right now. But she can’t really fight her body as her feet refuse to move, sticking her to the ground, and seems to force her to watch the figure before her, surrounded by trash and dirt and puddles upon puddles of rain.

Said figure says nothing, betrays nothing to indicate any signs of life whilst Kaede stands above them, wondering. The rain is a bit on the heavier side that evening, heavy enough that she could feel each drop landing on her umbrella with a cold _smack_ and watch each drop cascading off the figure’s dark shroud. She wonders, idly, if she’s simply unlucky to suddenly be the _one_ person to find a dead body on the _one_ shortcut she allows herself to take when she wants to go home, or if God hates her enough that he constantly plays tricks on her. (She refrains from thinking the phrase “first my parents, now _this?!_ ” in the typical, whiny, self-absorbed TV fashion). It’s only when the figure sneezes, softly but there, that makes Kaede bend down and shelter them under her umbrella.

“Are you alright?” The figure says nothing back, trying—once more—to melt into the cement, like they were trying not to exist. Kaede can relate to that. “I know you’re alive. You sneezed just now, didn’t you.” The pianist is well aware that her question came out more as a statement, but she hoped it would get any reaction, a jolt maybe, from her companion. Though she entertains herself with the thought that, if she were in an anime right now, one of those shows Rantaro’s friend loves so much, the figure would be sweating bullets. “Do you need help?”

No response. Though Kaede does think about simply stepping over the person and think nothing of the encounter, a part of her wants to see what would happen, see if anything would change, if she kept talking.

She wonders if this is how Ouma, an old classmate of hers, felt whenever he started up his no-good trickery every so often.

Perhaps that’s why when her inner devil, the “Ouma Devil” as she will now call him, pushes her to make contact with this person (Kaede is certain it’s a person now, given the sneeze), and poke them a little. Get them to recognize her presence.

So she pokes them, and she’s immediately flipped over. Greeted with a hand to her neck, the concrete to her back, rain to her face, her umbrella tossed to the side and a knife against her cheek. But of course the first thing she notices, despite all of these dangers, is the hair billowing next to each side of her face, the hair sticking to her skin. It’s a solid brown, reminding her of Rantaro’s concoction of dark hot chocolate he brews once or twice every winter.

“Hello.” She says, not really registering what just happened. At least she attempted to move against her attacker’s hand, but it firmly keeps her in place. So she stays there, under the stranger, and wonders idly if she has to call Rantaro to hold dinner for the night. (In fact, she imagines this hypothetical conversation, deciding that it would probably go about like this:

“Hey, Rantaro, I won’t be eating dinner tonight.”

She would hear the pot boiling on his end. “Oh, why not? Got a surprise gig?” There would be a tap as he tries to shake the remaining liquids off his spoon, most likely using it on a separate dish.

“No, just have a knife to my face and a hand to my throat. Relatable things. I’ll probably see you at eleven?” Kaede’s “friend’s” face would probably twist in confusion at this point, wondering why the pianist would use her “one free phone call” for this guy on the other line.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll save you some dinner then!” Rantaro would chirp, ready to hang up before shouting, finally regurgitating the information, “ _wait, wha—_ )

Kaede, the maniac that she is, lets out a laugh at this train of thought. This, of course, makes the hand holding her neck just a little tighter, and has the knife moving closer to her face a _little_ more. It’s a shame that telepaths weren’t legit people in her world, else she would be able to share her little joke with the other without having to awkwardly explain the context of the situation.

“Sorry, just thought about something funny.” The brunette, from their hidden face (Kaede wants to guess that the person hovering over her is a woman, but she’ll hold off until she’s sure), seems confused by this remark. Rightfully so, after all, who would be so calm in a situation like this? A little buzzed Kaede Akamatsu, that’s who.

“So, like, are you going to keep me here forever or..?” The knife touches her cheek and she feels her blood spilling out at the same time as she feels it numbing. “I mean, that’s a legitimate question. Since it’s raining and I have a roommate who’s probably waiting for me so that we can eat dinner—” the hand is leaving bruises, Kaede can feel the bruises spreading, “—and hey I was just thinking you wanna join?”

There is a whistle (maybe a wheeze? Not from the “haha, that’s funny” kind either) that emits from the stranger’s throat and it makes Kaede shiver. Have they never used their throat before? No, Kaede corrects herself, noticing the white underneath the dark clothing, wrapped tightly around the other’s neck. A wound.

 _What_? It sounds more like a breathy sigh than anything else, but Kaede gets it. She’s feeling this impending conversation now.

“See, I’m a little bit drunk? Just a little!” She imagines the other’s eyes rolling, at least to keep her mind away from the hand and the knife. “Just a little bit and so I wanted to take this shortcut, the alleyway we’re in by the way, but you were sitting in the middle of it? I thought it would be rude for me to, like, walk over you and all, since you’re just chilling on the ground. But I’m also pretty sure this would’ve happened if I tried to bypass you anyway.” Kaede could practically feel the question of “why didn’t you go the other way then” emanating from the other person. “But listen. Drunk me makes a lot of dumb mistakes, so why not let her make another now? Do you want to, I don’t know, clean up at my place? Like, you’re probably a dangerous person or whatever my parents call them but? I really can’t turn a blind eye on a person who I know I can give a temporary home to, and help them out a bit.” She flashes a smile, one from another time where she thought she could fake it, just for extra measure. “Call me a saint.”

The hand slackens throughout her entire spiel, as well as the knife distancing itself from her face, and Kaede takes the opportunity to turn the tables. Or, well, at least try to. As soon as she moves the impending danger is close again, but somehow weaker this time. The stranger even slumps against her, their breaths harsh against her neck that almost makes her giggle on the impact. Kaede refrains, however, and pokes at the person again. They’re awake and aware, as they hiss away from her fingers, but they don't try to move away from her. Then she feels warmth at her side, and when she peers down she sees a pooling red liquid. Oh, she finds herself thinking, it’s probably blood. OH, THAT’S BLOOD, her mind helpfully supplies.

She immediately jumps up, carrying the person up along with her. “You’re bleeding out.” She says, eyes wide and mouth slack.

 _No shit_ , the other person seems to reply, hissing as they’re raised into a position that only puts pressure in their wounds.

“Sorry, okay, uh, hold onto me like this,” Kaede tries to arrange them in a way that she can support the two of them with ease, while at the same time hiding the fresh blood stain on her coat. “Okay, we’re going to take this slowly, alright?”

The shrouded figure, only moves their head, as if questioning her continued assistance. She can only shrug. Kaede doesn't know either, but it's what she's doing now.

“Today was already deemed Kaede Makes A Mistake Today™,” she hopes that the stranger catches the small ™ at the end, “so what’s more to add with Drunk Kaede, hm?” The stranger only slackens at that, seemingly not having any energy left in them to question and argue. (Or attack and maybe kill a little, the little Ouma Devil chirps. She bats him away before he could say anything else.)

“Oh, but hold on, let me call my roommate. Don’t want them to freak out about a random person in the house, yeah?” No response. Kaede dials Rantaro’s number quickly as she struggles carrying two people at the same time. At least she’s a little bit sober now, with the rain acting as a cold shower for her. Unfortunately, however, the man didn’t seem keen with picking up his phone, so she leaves a message that may or may not went along the lines of this:

“Uh, hey, Rantaro, picked someone up in the rain today. We might have a new member of the household,” she takes the chance to peek at said “new member”. “Yeah, found them in the rain. You know the deal. So this is, uh, a heads up. I don’t think I can leave them in the rain like this, so I’m taking them home? Sorry for the short notice. Bye.”

It then strikes Kaede, as she begins to see the roof of their apartment, that she left her umbrella in the middle of the alleyway, and that the stranger still has their knife.

Fuck.

* * *

Rantaro comes in bearing trinkets and toys that Kaede can only assume are for pets, hopefully. He smiles at her wildly, the objects falling from his arms as he asks her quickly where their new house guest is now residing. Kaede, of course, shows him to her room that she’s loaning to the “stray” she told him about over the phone. And of course Rantaro rushes in to greet her sleeping guest.

“Kaede,” Rantaro promptly drops all of his gifts on the floor and Kaede cannot help but watch them fall, click-clacking onto their floor. “Kaede, that’s not a cat.”

She looks away from the toys and looks back up to Rantaro, who is then pointing to their surprise guest, snoring away in Kaede’s bed. Said guest seemed to be almost swallowed up by the various pillows and large, softly colored plushies Kaede surrounds herself with on a nightly basis. The scene in front of her is such a wild contrast from before, with the plushies representing trash, the blankets representing the woman’s cloak and the puddles around her, and the pillows representing the heaps of dirt Kaede found her in. It makes her want to laugh a little, but she refrains. Rantaro doesn’t like jokes he isn’t in on.

Speaking of Rantaro, he probably wants some answers. Her gaze moves dully to and from the subject in the bed and back to her roommate. Kaede can only answer plainly:

“I know? I don’t know what you expected when I told you I picked someone up.” There is a snort, from the room, and Kaede watches as Rantaro flinches away from the sound. “I meant what I said. I brought someone home.”

The man begins to owlishly blink at her, and if Kaede was good at mathematics she would try to calculate the rate of how fast he was blinking as the seconds passed. Rantaro straightens his posture, seemingly collecting himself as he takes deep inhales of breath. Then, suddenly, he releases it out all at once, striking a pose not too dissimilar to their other friend’s, Kaito’s, stance whenever he shouts a judging “BOY”. That is to say, Rantaro sports a pose with his legs slightly bent, making an almost diamond shape with his lower body, and presses his hands together into a prayer stance. There is also his crouched back and leaned forward head, and it makes Kaede worry, for a moment, if her friend was aching in that position, given his chronic back pains.

“ _Why?_ ” Is what hisses out of his throat and into the space between the two of them, and Kaede is both amused at the sight before her, and the manner in which it played out,  while also feeling no sympathy for her roommate. Instead of laughing or staring back at him, however, she simply shrugs.

“Because,” and she really tries to think about why she took the young woman in, in the middle of the rain with a seemingly dying person lying in the middleof her shortcut. Getting nothing in return, it seemed, besides the several attempts at murder made by the stranger throughout the span between the shortcut and the walk to her shared home with Rantaro. But looking at her bed now, with the long haired brunette simply sleeping like she never had a good bed her entire life (which might just be longer than what Kaede is estimating), it warms a small part of her heart—the part that likes to help people in need—that she thought had died years ago. “I don’t know why.” She settles, as the woman snorts again in her sleep, and turns away from the open light flowing out of the door, facing the window.

“ _You don’t know?_ ” Rantaro’s voice gets more and more exasperated at her, a tone of voice she hasn’t heard since the time when the two of them still had classes with a certain lying classmate. “So you’re basically, like,” he pauses, adjusting his stance and his voice to mimic hers, “oh, hey. Look, there’s a random woman in the street _let me just take her home?_ ” Kaede laughs at that, before quieting down as the woman, once more, turns in her sleep. She comes to the conclusion (ah, she sounds like a detective. Coming to conclusions and making assumptions on people’s characters, said people only coming into her small world some hours before) that the woman was originally a light sleeper, ready to pounce on any who simply breathed outside her door. But because of the state Kaede found her in, broken and barely able to talk, her body is probably screaming for rest, negating her, or what Kaede can perceive, usual tendencies. So she is quick to shush her roommate, lead the two of them away from the room, and silently shut the door behind them.

“Let’s take this to the kitchen.” Kaede smiles as she pushes Rantaro with a force that she didn’t know she had. The other can only cross his arms and pout with her attitude, Rantaro unused to being treated like a child.

“This better be a good story.” He takes a seat across from her, in their little space made for a “dining room”. The table itself was relatively short, a total of six seats (four on the sides of the table, two on each side, and a chair for the two ends) being the max amount of space the table could accommodate. From her side of the table, she can see pass Rantaro’s head and into the kitchen behind them.

“You sound like Ouma. ‘You better tell me a good story or I’ll have my men assassinate you!’” She too takes a seat.

“Blah, blah, you’re stalling. Tell me everything, even the most boring details.” Rantaro has that face when he sees a good puzzle, and Kaede wonders if this is how it would feel to be a frog saved for a biology class: chilled with chemicals, nothing of her body left but the cold grasped of death holding her. Only waiting to be dissected by an inexperienced student, looming over her with a shaking scalpel and a rubber gloved hand.

“Well, I woke up this morning kind of bored—” she laughs when Rantaro reaches to pinch her face, dragging a piece of her cheek.

“You know what I mean!”

She does, and so Kaede begins telling the story properly, examining her nails as she did so, and finding dirt under them. The same dirt, she unconsciously thinks, that dug into the other woman’s body as she made her decision to her hurry through the pouring rain to take both of them home. She closes her fist, and does not look at her hands through the remainder of the story, feeling _something_ that she was unsure what it would be called.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that wraps up this chapter. thanks for reading!! Even though this isn't beta'd and there's probably a lot of errors, the fact that you guys reached the end of this makes me feel warm and gooey on the inside, and I hope more people add to the kaede/maki pairing because I know it's like. basic lol but pls im thirsty
> 
> oh! if you want to hmu on social media swing by @meowganya on twitter. I mostly spam rts about the 1,242,345 fandoms i'm in but if you want to just talk about this then slide into my dms!! I also do art? So I may also do art of this story lowkey
> 
> update 1/11/2018: finishing up the chapter and it's taking literally all of me to not take longer to fix up this chapter. new suitable title (Stray was a placement title anyway). see you on the flip side dudes.


	2. The Curtain Falls, The Story Ends, Side 2: Maki

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She notes her surroundings being covered by plushies, pillow throws, and other soft to the touch materials. From across from her, Maki sees the door, silently ajar from the blonde’s rushed exit. Even without the light from the adjacent room, Maki could see white walls with decoration (though there was some hanging tape. Perhaps the woman had attempted to personalize her room before thinking otherwise?) and the ceiling with only a small, weak glow in the chorus of faded stars. 
> 
> _How plain_ , Maki couldn’t help but think. _Out of all of the people who could capture me, I got stuck with the plain one._
> 
> She waits for the other woman to come back, her ears straining to catch the clatter the stranger makes from the other room. But she ends up slowly closing her eyes, strangely comforted by the sound of someone else in her general vicinity.
> 
>  _Ah_ , Maki catches herself, _that sounds sad_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I do anything else, I would like to say GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE. Will add that to the tag.
> 
> hello again! wow it's been awhile. this chapter was a bit harder to write than the first one, if you haven't notice, and I did a lot of work writing and cutting and writing and cutting and writing again. But here's Maki's chapter! In all of its sequenced glory. 
> 
> Hopefully I didn't miss a section while I was editing, since I jumped around a lot while writing this; writing each sequence at the same time to keep myself going. Originally I planned for this to be a bit longer, as seen from the increase in dialogue near the end, but decided it was too much and cut it out. I might be using them for other scenes in the next chapters though.
> 
> But just in case! Here's some facts about Maki that I couldn't quite put in throughout the chapter:
> 
> -Maki is heavily scarred, of course, but she's also missing some appendages. Due to her chaotic nature, as my characterization of her ended up more "wild" in terms of disobeying her superiors than in the canon game, she fucks up a lot.  
> -So far she has lost her right pinkie toe, which causes a slight limp in her gait (it makes her waddle if she doesn't focus on walking straight), her ring left toe, and her left ring finger. There's also some scarring from several attempts at trying to cut off her left hand and right foot, but we'll get to those in a later chapter  
> -Maki's most tender area on her body is her stomach, which is also heavily scarred in terms of surgical stitching, but also scarred from stray blades and the like.  
> -Maki is like. Constantly tense. Like, sure Kaede is tense too in the way that she's always anxious but Maki? Oh shit Maki is TENSE not even acupuncture can make her muscles relax. So she's a bit jumpy  
> -Maki likes hot baths and showers. Like, scalding. Fun fact: people who take long and hot showers are subconsciously trying to use the water's temperature to make up for their lack of shared body warmth with other people.  
> -Kaede has pretty much bandaged Maki head to toe. If you need a visual, I would recommend looking up a character from bungou stray dogs that is also seemingly bandaged from head to toe. He gave me the idea. She will remain as such until a certain event in a certain chapter ;^)

It was a spring evening, she struggles to remember, when she saw her reflection for the first time. At that time, it was evening, and the Moon and Her stars bared themselves to the world as if they were trying to reach for her—to tell her they were there with her—and watched as she scratched at dirt and grass to crawl towards the blue lake. She doesn’t remember why she had arrived there, in that small secret of nature she had found, but she was well aware that there was no turning back then, as she grasped at dead strands of green to see what was at the end of (what she had perceived) the ocean.

(Even if she wasn’t dragging herself across the ground; even if she wasn’t barely breathing; even if she wasn’t bleeding extensively at the tips of her fingers to the ends of her toes, she wouldn’t have been able to escape.)

She stared at the sky through the waves of the lake. In that water, rippling from the leftover dew of the trees, she saw her own face. She remembers vaguely feeling her lungs combust into tiny, bitty dust particles and feeling a pricking at the ends of her eyes. She exhaled then, choking on her own spit, and released a sound she wouldn’t utter again.

 _What a mess_ , she can’t help but think, _what a mess I am_.

 

Maki Harukawa wakes up, her eyes fluttering, there but not there at the same time. She realizes with a numbed jolt that she was surrounded by water, but not so much in the “I’m drowning so I should be struggling” kind of delayed thought. It’s more of an “ah, the soap has a smell that isn’t animal fat” kind of thought. There is a dull ache in the back of her head, and her mind supplies that the ache is most likely her body repressing the onslaught of crippling pain she should be experiencing right now, but she doesn’t think too much about that.

Maki, instead, opts to watch (with a numbness she didn’t realize she could possess) as a rubber duck bumps into the right side of her left knee. _Hello, little friend,_ she thinks dumbly, _I thought Rikiya blew you up last Saturday._ Maki feels her eyes rolling around, an instinctive need to search for exits and be aware of her surroundings, but fails to see anything pass the beige tiled walls (with small floral designs to give it a china plate feeling) and the equally beige tiled floors. A bathroom? She feels with her feet instead, not bothering to complain her body’s insistent need to be aware of anything and everything—it was too late for those thoughts now.

She notes the walls upon walls of shampoos and conditioners lining (what she can only presume as) the bathroom tub. Maki notes with an internalized snort that she had never seen so many bottles of hair care before in her life, preferring to find a companion in dish soap to care for those types of things. It makes her wonder if her kidnapper (could they really be considered a kidnapper if she just let them take her anyway? That night when someone simply dragged her back home with them was rather vague now, but when she wakes up more, she’ll remember. Right now, she’s fine with playing the barely lucid character) plans to kill her through the torturous procedure of refining her hygiene habits. Maki laughs, though she knows the sound is internal when the faucet in front of her continues to drip without any cut through the _plip, plip, plip_.

She feels so warm, sitting there surrounded by bubbles and soap. (She doesn’t realize she’s sinking). From her dry patches on the tips of her cheeks to the bottom, peeling skin of her toes, she feels a warmth that she hasn’t experienced in a long time—doesn’t think she experienced a sensation close to it in her life. It makes her think she’s dreaming one of those dreams, like Elaine does about cotton and clouds and sheep.

 _I’m dreaming_ , she decides, _I’m dreaming_. There’s no other way to put this scene into logic, into any sort of plane in rationality. Though, she doesn’t mind this fantasy, Maki thinks, and is astounded by how much her imagination has overgrown. She had never fancied herself to be a “head in the clouds” sort of person, always opting to remind herself constantly that there was no other way to live but to live with the orphanage—with the Groupe. The only way to find a cozy home in the middle of nowhere, she had decided at a young age, after the Groupe pulled her out of the lake’s water coughing and sputtering everywhere, was to die over and over and over again. (Not too dissimilar to what they did to her, gripping the back of her head so hard that she thought they cracked some parts of her skull, and thrusting her into the moon’s reflection until her lungs really couldn’t breathe anymore.) She would have to die, to atone, until she had reached to the slant edges of Nirvana, a choir singing as she grasps at the entrance with the fervor of a dying man, only for the gates to close on her—snapping—and to send her back to the realm of reality again.

But if this was a dream, then so be it. It is a break of the cold, of the flat, cement floors, and if this dream could give her a break she desperately needed, then so shall she dream. (But her mind tries to desperately tell her to _wake up, wake up, wake up_.)

It’s an out of body experience when she feels herself starting to sink, her feet slowly sliding down the tub’s floor and fading into the numbness of this strange, strange illusion. She fails to realize that her head is being enveloped by the water, and can’t stop herself from slosing further down into the white abyss. Her limbs languid and not hers for those detrimental moments, until she begins to fade into the water, her mouth suddenly too close to the soap. The rubber duck passes the spot where her knee once was, and she finds herself closing her eyes in preparation for _something_.

Maki is not sure what.

She descends completely, one of her feet slipping on the smooth bottom of the bathroom tub.

Before her body could kick to action, frailing with arms and legs and teeth, somebody else catches her. They lift her up slowly, with a firmness that Maki doesn’t recall anyone she knows having. Her skin, being tender and hypersensitive despite the numbness, feels each callous under each fingertip of her “savior”. There are curses bouncing off the porcelain tiles, cutting off the rhythmic _plips_ of the faucet droplets. But the words fall onto dead ears, as they're only white noise in Maki's unresponsive ears), the voice feminine but rough. Maki blearily looks up, her head knocking on the other person’s chest, rather plump now that she thinks about it. Through her lidded eyes she sees a combination of yellow hair tickling the sides of her cheeks, and a pool of purple.

 _This is a dream_ she, not her mind, reiterates, _and this is Death coaxing you to dream_. She thinks its a nice way to send herself off, then, if this were a dream from Death. In a pool of soap fashioned as prison bars, filled with a warmth she never really knew. In this pool, Maki sees not only the person holding her but her own reflection. Staring back at her with a certain haze that she felt. She sees waves of brown in those purple irises, loose and unlike the usual low pigtails she dons, at the sides of her face, and feels a wetness there. She sees the red eyes melt into disgusting brown hues—like dirt—but she knows that dirt in her eyes could bear no flowers to bloom. It will just be dirt.

Maki closes her eyes then, knowing that looking further would only give her answers she doesn’t want to hear, and falls back to sleep.

 

The first time Maki Harukawa ever saw what she looked like, what she _really_ looked like, was when she was a young child. Maybe she was eight—maybe she was six—she can’t say for sure. But she remembers how she had managed to get there, far away from the Groupe that was her entire childhood, far enough to a small secret the world hid from all but her, in that moment. It was a small lake surrounded by the rustle of trees, the moonlight hitting the waters at the perfect angle for it to shine. It was there that she found herself at that large lake, the moon shining down on her and everything around her, that she came to know her own face. It was the first time she ever saw her own reflection in her life, at that point, and she found herself mystified by the curves of her face, the redness around her eyes— _in her eyes—_ and her cheeks and the bottoms of her elbows. In that water, rippling from the leftover dew of trees, was her, and she could barely process it at the age of six or eight (she thinks it was seven instead, seven sounded like a good number). But her curiosity was what killed her, spiritually, in the end. Because at that moment—at that single pause of breath, the only fraction where time slowed—the Groupe found her, and they made sure to let her know that vanity was not to be tolerated.

Suffice to say, she has yet to look at herself with the same amazement since.

That was the dream (should she call it a memory? Would that normalize everything that happened and will happen to her?) Maki had before she woke up to purple eyes and blond hair. (None of the children had such features. In fact, they were all rather dully colored in Maki’s opinion. All blacks and browns, sometimes blue eyes if they were unfortunate enough. Maki is the only one who was born with red, and she supposes it fits. She was the only one suited for “Red”, after all.) She immediately tried to jump up, plow down her opponent, and—if she was lucky enough—die crawling back home. (She could already feel the bruise on her solar plexus seeping through her skin and into bone. It makes her wonder if bones bruised yellow and blue and purple too.)

But she couldn’t, her own lightweight disadvantaging her. She could only move her head slightly, and the only thing she could see was the looming figure above her. As much as her body screamed to run or to move away, she couldn’t. Her entire body was searing with pain, despite her training, and she could feel it spreading from her middle abdomen region and the back of her neck. Maki recognized this immobility, knew what it meant, and hated this fragile body of hers.

(Despite her efforts, she goes back to a scene shoved under the layers of her memory then. The orphanage manager stands over her like a shroud against her shoulders, his foot pressing against the shredded skin of her neck. She refuses to let out a sound, ever so silent. No, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to—as if she was fighting against the power enslaving her—she kept her silence because she didn’t want to be punished. She wanted the lesson to stop. That was what kept her lips sealed, but her teeth clenched together. Her silence only cemented her status as a prisoner to these devilish guards. But they were human, those guards, and so the orphanage manager releases her neck and starts walking away, telling her with his back turned:

 _Though you’re certainly gifted_ , he starts dusting himself off, as if she was dirty. Despite everything, she can feel her muscles tensing, her teeth curling, her eyes dilating. _You will never be able to surpass experience or muscle mass. A pity, really_. He folds his hands against his back, turning back toward her and she prays to whatever false God people bend their backs for that he doesn’t catch the tension in her face. _Did you hear that, little one? You can never conquer me, or anyone else without these skills. Don’t you understand what we’re doing?_ Maki feels disgust curling into the front of her skull, pulling at the ends of her mouth and forcing her eyes to stay open, staring into the void that replaced the manager’s face in this memory. _It’s kill or be killed, as cliché as it is, and if you keep this up you_ will _be the one killed, no?_ He turns around again, sighing. _But now that I think about it, maybe it isn’t a pity. Perhaps it’s just your role in this life, to be a child in the world of adults forever until the day you use up your purpose—if you ever had one in the first place._

Maki could feel the invisible pressure releasing her then, her rage reaching a peak. Had this been a cartoon, maybe the manager would hear the steam coming from her ears, and would’ve turned around. But they weren’t, in a cartoon that is, and she hardly made a noise as she jumped on the man, knocking him out with her flailing arms and ripping him into shreds, digging her fingers into his skin and tearing violently, bit by bit, piece by piece.)

 

“Are you okay?” She comes to with the feeling of someone curling their hand near her arms, and she twitches back to consciousness. Maki feels her saliva sticking to her throat as she tries to gasp for breath. Her chest still hurts, she’s sure that the bruise has successfully kissed bone at this point, as she couldn’t twist without an inferno of pain ripping through her.

“That’s a dumb question, of course you’re not okay.” Comes a self-deprecating laugh above her. She tries to turn her head the best she could, without trying to play with Death. (It hurts even with the smallest turn of her head.) There, sitting next to her, was the blonde woman who Maki can now see was of average height (from what she could see), looking down at her with the same purple eyes she saw in the dream (perhaps it wasn’t a dream then, her mind tells her. She decides to listen to it this time). Though her hair is tied up, rather than framing the woman’s face, Maki is sure that this was the same woman from the bathroom and tries to shove the embarrassment from the illusion that wasn’t quite an illusion down—but it probably never showed on her face in the first place, Maki was never the most expressive person even before the Groupe.

“Good morning, er, afternoon I guess.” The stranger hazards a glance to the clock that was probably beside Maki’s head, pillowed by plushies and soft pillows. “How are you feeling today? Do you need anything?”

The stranger’s face was smooth, seemingly well taken care of by its owner. Her lashes were long and her face was… nice, Maki cannot help supply. Though her face betrayed nothing of any interior motive, Maki has killed people for less. She could’ve been given a Guinness Award for the amount of kills she’s committed because of her paranoia, had murder been deemed appropriate for the high moral grounds of society. The assassin is quick to move on from this thought, however, and goes back to observing the woman before her.

“Um, hello?” The young woman was probably in her early twenties, if Maki could summize a guess. She also seemed to possess long fingers. They were longer than Maki’s own, stubby ones, held no bruises, no indents of skin to show scars, though they had calluses on both of her ring fingers, jutting out like a cancer. A writer, then? No, if the woman before her was a writer, then she would not have such undamaged fingers. Maki continues to observe in miniscule detail. The other’s nails are small, filed to the barest that they could be, but still cleaned meticulously. A strange thought plays around in the assassin's mind as she weighs the idea of the person across from her being a nail model before thinking against it, deeming it ridiculous.

“Excuse me? Can you hear me?” Maki startles with how close the other person has gotten to her without Maki noticing, but she attributes it to her current lead head. But it still brought her discomfort, as the stranger’s fingers were threatening to stab her cheek. She holds the instinct to snap at the other, knowing it would not bond well with the current power dynamic at play, and tries to respond to the overload of queries coming from the other woman.

However, the assassin finds her throat, once more, icky with her own saliva and an unrelenting pain coming from the back of her neck. She tries speaking, opening her jaw slightly before snapping it back closed. Ah, the vagus nerve, she mindlessly thinks. Hers was hit in the fight. She monotonously goes through the symptoms of injury to the nerve without really thinking, connecting her prevalent nausea and seemingly tied vocal nerves to it before bringing her eyes back to the person before her, trying her best to communicate that she could not respond even if she wanted to.

“Oh, uh, can you not speak?” If it didn’t hurt like hell Maki would’ve rolled her eyes and shaken her head sarcastically. But at that moment, with her body slowly closing down from the aches and throbs, she could not bare to force her body to perform such an action and instead continues staring at the girl in front of her.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.” The blond supplies to herself, and Maki watches as she departs the room for a moment, and takes the time to look around.

(Even if she wouldn’t be able to execute any of the moves she would usually attempt, she can still plan it; still prepare in the case of this woman being a secret _secret_ assassin—and as moronic the thought is, she knows the occupation too well for Maki to jest with—ready to execute any and all who disrupts the mundanity of her, the other woman’s, hypothetical secret life.)

She notes her surroundings being covered by plushies, pillow throws, and other soft to the touch materials. From across from her, Maki sees the door, silently ajar from the blonde’s rushed exit. Even without the light from the adjacent room, Maki could see white walls with decoration (though there was some hanging tape. Perhaps the woman had attempted to personalize her room before thinking otherwise?) and the ceiling with only a small, weak glow in the chorus of faded stars.

 _How plain,_ Maki couldn’t help but think. _Out of all of the people who could capture me, I got stuck with the plain one_.

She waits for the other woman to come back, her ears straining to catch the clatter the stranger makes from the other room. But she ends up slowly closing her eyes, strangely comforted by the sound of someone else in her general vicinity.

 _Ah_ , Maki catches herself, _that sounds sad._

* * *

Maki Harukawa is a lot of things. A murderer, a heartless woman, a monster. She is a lot of horrendous, evil things that can rip her image as a human being into shreds. And if someone bothered to pick up the pieces, it would create this disgusting amalgamation of blood, flesh, and bone. Yet, despite all of these words that are often said to her, attached to her, _are_ her, she is unfamiliar with the word “patient”. As in the person who is being nursed to health, as her “savior” (she uses the word loosely, nothing about Maki or anyone involved with her are martyrs or saints) states whilst trying to spoon feed her childish, _infantile_ alphabet soup.

“Yeah, like, I’m nursing you back to health. So you’re my patient.” The dumb stranger who decided on a whim to pick her up explains to Maki, as the woman practically shoves the spoon to her lips, emitting dumb noises that makes Maki feel even more childish than she already was. So she doesn’t swallow. Though the woman is persistent, at the very least, and continues without being discouraged by Maki’s uncooperation. The spoon still hangs between them, poking at Maki’s lips every so often against the firm line of her mouth. She takes the opportunity, as the other tries to convince her the soup was made with the purest of intentions (taking a bite or two or maybe consuming half the soup already herself, which she argues that _it’s really good and Rantaro worked really hard to make this so_ one _of us has to eat it!_ ), to analyze the woman before her, trying to find hints in everything the stranger could give her through body language. There is nothing out of the ordinary, other than sudden flickers of movement that jostle Maki from the mist hanging over her brain—but that seems more so the stranger's natural speed.

(She notes each area of numbness in her body, not so much because of the stranger sitting beside her, but because of her body’s natural response to the stimulus she endured in the past twenty-four hours. Her arms could barely move, almost as if they were stuck in a continuous state of pins and needles, never finding release. Maki’s legs were similar, barely being able to tense under the soreness of her muscles and the screams they would release if she so dared turned on her own volition. She wonders why she didn’t feel this thundering ache before, but chalks it up to the pain that once came from her most sensitive areas of her body (now a dulled), to the adrenaline feeding her lungs, and to fatigue wearing her nerves down. Maki  is still unable to speak. Though her wounds were clean and patched up accordingly, Maki still feels the urge to tear them all off herself, so that she can scratch at them until the persistent itch bleeds away.)

“Come on, at least take a bite? I’ve already proven that this isn’t poisoned. It’s not even slow acting poison since we’ve been doing this for, like, what? An hour?”

It’s only been fifteen minutes, but who’s counting?

“So please? At least one bite? I don’t want you dying of starvation on me! It would such a mess to explain to our landlord!” The blonde begs, holding the bowl out like an offering, and Maki stares into it for a few moments, watching as the noodle alphabet float in the greenish bowl, seasonings sprinkled everywhere in the broth. She feels the woman watch her watch the soup, but doesn’t move as the spoon moves the letters around, an attempt to form a word. Maki thinks she’s trying to spell _please_ but with how the letters float around in the bowl, it’s more of a pathetic _plasee._ She looks at the woman, who only looks at her with wide eyes and a pouting lip. It reminds her of a child rather than a woman who could be in her early twenties, and it makes the woman far more of a pest than Maki realized she could be.

With a roll of her eyes, Maki feels her lips part, and the woman automatically shoves a spoonful of soup down her throat. (And if anyone asks, she didn’t make any sound remotely close to a gagging screech, no matter what the other occupant of the house says.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading to the end!!! i really appreciate it! I also hope that you liked what I'm doing with the story so far! I would love if you sent me a comment to tell me what you liked or even disliked about the chapter! but I'll get working on the next, so see you guys later! I hope you guys are having a nice day, and if you aren't I hope that tomorrow is kinder to you!! bye!


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